Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

SMPlayer 15.9 (Stable) Released With mpv Support, More

SMPlayer, a Qt front-end for mplayer, has reached version 15.9.0 recently, this being the first stable version to support mpv. There are various other new features as well, like support for 3D stereo filter, MPRIS v2 support, a new default theme and more.

SMPlayer

Foxit PDF Reader Sees New Linux Release

Foxit PDF Reader for Linux was updated recently, after years of no new releases. The new version brings support for opening PDFs in tabs, annotations and more.

Foxit PDF Reader Linux

Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf Final Beta Available For Download


Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf final beta (beta 2 for the flavors) was released last night, bringing updated applications (including most GNOME 3.16.x apps), GNOME's overlay scrollbars by default for GTK3 applications and of course, numerous bug fixes.

GNOME 3.18 Released, See What`s New

GNOME 3.18

After six months of work, GNOME 3.18 was released today, bringing some important Files application improvements, built-in Firmware upgrades, as well as a new preview application called 'To Do'.

Extract Individual Tracks From Audio CD Images With Flacon

Flacon is a Qt tool which can be used to extract individual tracks from audio CD images which contain an entire album, such as WavPack, APE, FLAC, WAV or True Audio, based on the information provided in the CUE file.

Flacon

The application provides output format-specific settings: you can set the output quality, compression and so on as well as ReplayGain, either per album or per track.

Another useful Flacon feature is its ability to tag the resulting tracks, either based on the information provided in the CUE file or manually.

Complete Flacon feature list:
  • supports the following input formats: WAV, FLAC, APE, WavPack, True Audio (TTA).
  • supported output formats: LAC, WAV, WavPack, AAC, OGG, MP3 and Opus (with the latest Flacon 1.2.0) with preset and quality settings, etc.;
  • replay Gain analysis (album-gain and track-gain modes);
  • multi-threaded conversion process;
  • automatic character set detection for CUE files;
  • automatially tag resulting track files;

Flacon 1.2.0, released recently, brings Qt5 support along with Opus output support. However, please note that the packages available in the official Flacon PPA are still built with Qt4.


Install Flacon in Ubuntu or Linux Mint


To install Flacon in Ubuntu or Linux Mint, you can use its official PPA. To add the PPA and install the application, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flacon/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install flacon
For other Linux distributions, see the Flacon downloads page.

Report any bugs you may find @ GitHub.

Enpass Password Manager 5.0 RC Released With Browser Extensions For Auto-Filling Login Credentials

Enpass 5.0 RC was released recently (64bit only for Linux), bringing one of the most requested features: browser extensions for both Firefox and Chrome on Linux and Windows (and for Safari on Mac), which allows auto-filling your username/password and other sensitive information directly from the web browser.

Enpass 5.0 Linux

For those not familiar with Enpass, this is a proprietary cross-platform password manager which uses SQLCipher under the hood, an open source extension to SQLite that provides transparent 256-bit AES encryption of database files.

The app comes with many useful features, including built-in (encrypted) backup/sync to Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box and ownCloud/WebDAV and is available for Linux, Windows and Mac as well as iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. The desktop apps are free to use with no limitations while the mobile apps offer in-app purchases (Android, iOS) or cost 9.99$ (Windows Phone).

DockBarX Xfce4 Panel Plugin Updated With Panel Blending

Quick update: The DockBarX Xfce4 Panel plugin was updated to version 0.4.1 recently, bringing a pretty important new feature: panel blending.

DockBarX Xfce

Terminal Emulator `Terminator` Sees New Release

Terminator is terminal emulator which includes numerous useful features such as multiple terminals in the same window (split view), notifications, supports saving and restoring custom layouts and much more.

Terminator terminal emulator